How can I make Internet Explorer correctly implement full alpha transparency?

March 14, 2004 7:41 PM

Is there any easy to implement, close to 100% reliable, HTML, CSS, JS or whatever -hack to make IE correctly implement full alpha transparency in PNGs? It would make the life of this web developer much more happy and carefree.
posted by signal to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Something like this?
posted by Space Coyote at 7:49 PM on March 14, 2004

Or more simply this.
posted by Aaorn at 8:28 PM on March 14, 2004

Aeorn: Wouldn't that cause problems for Mac IE? That appears to be using directX, which obviously isn't available for Mac.

There's still a decent number of mac users out there using it, the mac users haven't all flooded to safari yet.
posted by malphigian at 9:05 PM on March 14, 2004

Both links above use exactly the same method, and yes, it's windows-only. It's also not in any way standards-compliant, if you care about that sort of thing.
posted by ook at 9:45 PM on March 14, 2004

ook : Well neither is IE to begin with, that's why one has to work around it :)
posted by Space Coyote at 9:48 PM on March 14, 2004

Fair point :)
posted by ook at 10:10 PM on March 14, 2004

I've used Sleight. I haven't used this, but it sounds interesting.

Here's an article and discussion at A List Apart.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:11 PM on March 14, 2004

I'm pretty sure you'll find Mac IE supports png. Stupid company...
posted by twine42 at 12:50 AM on March 15, 2004

I'm pretty sure you'll find Mac IE supports png.

Yes, it does, because PNG is handled by the Quicktime plugin.
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:01 AM on March 15, 2004

Sleight works really well.

IE5 Mac is how many years old? It doesn't support much and tis time to bring the Mac users to Safari/Camino/anything-but-IE anyway.
posted by mimi at 7:13 AM on March 15, 2004

I stand corrected; on my machine at least, Mac IE5 does support 8-bit transparency in PNG. Had to test it just now to be sure. (Does anyone know which quicktime update included this? Because I know I tested transparency support a year or so for a work project, and wound up script-generating thousands of GIFs instead.)

Just to be pedantic, Sleight is, again, basically the same method as the others above for tricking IE/Win to handle transparency -- though a much cleaner-looking implementation. They're all just fancy wrappers around DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader.
posted by ook at 7:37 AM on March 15, 2004